Two Pennsylvania men operating NoBull Solutions LLC, a reproductive service for dairies, are in prison following complaints of them practicing veterinary medicine without a license. 

On April 10, Rusty Herr, 43, was booked into the Lancaster County Prison. Meanwhile, his business partner, Ethan Wentworth, 33, was sent to the New York County Prison the next day.

The Pennsylvania Veterinary Medicine Association alleges in a complaint filed in Harrisburg that they had received reports of illegal practices of veterinary medicine by unlicensed individuals employed by NoBull Solutions. 

The complaint details Facebook advertisements of “all-encompassing reproductive management” for dairy farmers. 

This isn’t the first time Herr and Wentworth have had complaints filed against them over allegations of practicing without a license. In 2010, Herr was fined $3,500 for the illegal practice of veterinary medicine and ordered to Cease and Desist. Wentworth was fined $3,000 and ordered to Cease and Desist in 2018.

“Since these individuals continue to practice veterinary medicine without a license after their initial Order to Cease and Desist, we request that the state file contempt charges with Commonwealth Court,” the Pennsylvania Veterinary Medicine Association wrote in its complaint.  

Reports indicate that both men will be serving 30-day sentences without bail amid accusations of ultrasounding dairy cows and horses without a license and making other diagnoses. 

Ben Masemore, a dairy farmer and partner in sister business NoBull Sires LLC, is acting as spokesman for Herr and Wentworth. He told Lancaster Farming that the laws surrounding ultrasound are vague. 

“I know of up to 20 individuals in the state using ultrasound for reproduction. Anyone can purchase one, as they are readily available today,” he said.

Barnes Law LLP reportedly serves as NoBull’s legal defense team and was hired April 17, one week after the business owners’ arrests. According to the legal team, “Pregnancy is not a disease. Pregnancy is not an illness. Likewise, confirming pregnancy or successful reproduction is not a diagnosis. Medicinal definitions are clear: Identification of disease is termed diagnosis, the solution design is called treatment planning, and treatment where appropriate is then implemented as the solution.”

Wentworth’s wife, Gabrielle, calls the situation “troubling” on a NoBull Solutions LLC Defense Fund that was set up to help support ensuing legal fees.

“Wentworth was told to go to the Courthouse (in York) on the morning of April 10 to pay a fine. He was told he would see a judge,” wrote Gabrielle Wentworth. “Instead, he was kidnapped, denied the right to speak to an attorney or to call his family, and seven days later has still not seen a judge.”

According to Wentworth’s wife, Herr was arrested the next morning at home with his wife, Christiana, and children witnessing him being handcuffed and taken away.

“The officers refused to show Rusty’s wife the warrant until after they had taken Rusty away in handcuffs,” reads the legal fund’s website. “Rusty’s children were traumatized by the experience.”

So far, the legal defense fund on GiveSendGo has generated $11,741 through donations, with a total of $100,000 being requested. 

Because of concerns over antimicrobial resistance in humans and the public pushback against antimicrobials in livestock feed, the poultry industry is evolving toward more antibiotic-free production techniques to meet market demands. Penn State researchers are helping to identify and better understand alternative approaches.

The growing need for antibiotic-free products has challenged producers to decrease or completely stop using antimicrobials as feed supplements in the diet of broiler chickens to improve feed efficiency, growth rate, and intestinal health. Led by Erika Ganda, assistant professor of food animal microbiomes, a Penn State research team conducted a study of natural feed additives that are promising alternatives to substitute for antimicrobial growth promoters.

In findings available online now that will be published in the May issue of Poultry Science, the researchers characterized the effects of a probiotic and a blend of essential oils on broilers’ growth and gut health. The team found that supplementing the diet of young chicks with a probiotic over 21 days significantly boosted the abundance of beneficial intestinal microorganisms.

Overall, according to Ganda, research like the work her team conducted is urgently needed to help producers make decisions at the farm. However, she added, the use of these feed additives in broiler production is still in its early stages, and more studies to evaluate the health outcomes, mechanisms and consequences for antimicrobial resistance prevalence will be necessary to better understand the role of feeding antimicrobial growth promoters alternatives on the gastrointestinal tract of broilers.

“Because the elimination of antimicrobial growth promoters use is associated with increases in disease and a decrease in growth performance in chicks, antibiotic-free alternative approaches to enhance intestinal health and improve growth performance are of great interest to the poultry industry,” she said. “The claim that a product is ‘natural’ does not make it necessarily more beneficial than antibiotics, so we conducted this experiment to answer this question.”

In the research, spearheaded by Ana Fonseca, graduate assistant in Ganda’s research group in the College of Agricultural Sciences, a total of 320 one-day-old chicks were raised for 21 days in 32 randomly allocated cages. Treatments consisted of four experimental diets: a standard diet; and a standard diet mixed with the antibiotic bacitracin methylene disalicylate, or an essential oils blend of oregano oil, rosemary and red pepper, or the probiotic Bacillus subtilis.

Probiotics are live microorganisms that, when administered in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host by supporting a more diverse population of beneficial bacteria in the digestive tract. Essential oils are plant-derived extracts that possess various antioxidant, immune-modulating, antimicrobial properties and the ability to change the “microbiome” — in this case, the community of microorganisms living in the chicks’ intestines.

The researchers individually weighed all broiler chickens on day one and then at the end of each dietary phase on day 10 and day 21. The feed consumed per pen was monitored at the end of each growth phase. The team also calculated the daily body weight gain average, feed intake and feed conversion ratio of feed consumed divided by weight gain at three periods: the starter phase of one to 10 days, the grower phase of 11 to 21days and the total period of one to 21 days.

The team collected excreta samples daily during the entire experimental period and analyzed DNA to identify bacteria present. Across all time points, supplementing chicken diets with the probiotic or the antibiotic significantly changed the relative abundance of bacterial strains compared to the standard diet, Fonseca noted. However, there were no microorganisms affected by essential oils compared to the standard diet.

“We were somewhat surprised by the results of the essential oils — we were expecting them not only to have some effects on the microbiome, but also on the performance side,” she said. “We still think essential oils may present a promising alternative to antimicrobial growth promoters, but their effectiveness can be influenced by various factors. We only observed these animals for 21 days, and maybe the essential oils would have more significant effects when they are older, and their microbiome gets more stable. The benefits of essential oils in this context deserves more research.”

Drylands in the western United States are currently in the grips of a 23-year “megadrought,” and one West Virginia University researcher is working to gain a better understanding of this extreme climate event.

Steve Kannenberg, assistant professor of biology at the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, is using observations from existing networks of scientific instrument stations across the region to inch toward that goal.

The megadrought is an ongoing climate crisis for natural ecosystems, agricultural systems, and human water resources, but researchers have a limited understanding of the phenomenon.

With joint National Science Foundation funding from Ecosystem Science Cluster and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, commonly known as EPSCoR, Kannenberg is seeking to identify where this drought has been most severe.

Data should reveal where the conditions have depleted groundwater and soil moisture and identify which dryland plants have been most affected.

The term “drylands” refers to areas where water availability limits the health of ecosystems.

“In West Virginia, we have plenty of water,” he said. “But, if you go out to Utah, for example, it’s very hot, very dry. And the health of the vegetation is determined by how much water is in the soil and how much water is in the air.”

Data on the west’s climatological history can be obtained by studying tree growth rings in drylands. Using tree rings, researchers have found the current 23-year drought period is the most severe over the last 1,200 years. Kannenberg will pair tree ring data with measurements of soil moisture, groundwater and ecosystem fluxes via eddy covariance flux towers.

“These are, essentially, fancy weather stations that can sense the ecosystem breathing,” he said. “It can quantify how much carbon is going into the vegetation from the atmosphere as plants photosynthesize during the day, and likewise, how much carbon is breathed out back into the atmosphere at night, because ecosystems respire like we do.”

The towers can also measure how much water is coming in via rain, how much goes out through plants to the atmosphere and how much evaporates from the soil surface.

Globally, megadroughts are projected to increase in frequency and severity in the coming decades, and Kannenberg’s synthesized data may help inform researchers about other dryland and non-dryland biomes.

He’s also focused on carbon capture. The photosynthetic rate of the vegetation across drylands affects their ability to store carbon, but trees can only photosynthesize when there’s sufficient water available. This process is fairly consistent in eastern forests, but difficult to predict in drylands.

“If you think of a forest here in West Virginia, there’s obviously a lot of carbon stored in the vegetation,” he said. “This makes it a very important carbon sink, globally. It’s easy for scientists to predict how much carbon gets taken up by these trees every year because we know that the environment during the spring, summer and fall is pretty conducive to photosynthesis.”

However, with far less vegetation in western landscapes, less carbon is stored in drylands. Water availability is inconsistent and unpredictable, and the amount of carbon western vegetation can take up each year varies significantly. In drought years, little carbon may be absorbed at all.